Why Labour people should be thanking (and apologising to) Alan Milburn

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” they always say. But actually where the message comes from is vitally important.

When Alan Milburn accepted the role as “social mobility tsar” to the Government in 2010, many in the Labour Party were quick to round on him. Plenty of them should have known better. John Prescott added him to a list of “collaborators”, a label as over-the-top as it was tasteless.

Four years down the line, I think Milburn is owed a few apologies.

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (which he now chairs) published its annual report on Monday, and it makes damning reading for Cameron’s Government. It doesn’t just refuse to pull any punches; it’s wearing knuckle-dusters.

It warns that 3.5 million children will be living in absolute poverty by 2020 – almost five times the target the Government set themselves. This will be the first decade since records began not to see a fall in absolute child poverty.

Iain Duncan Smith claims that this can be avoided by getting more parents into work – a plan described by Milburn as not even “remotely realistic”. During this parliament, prices have risen while wages have stagnated and, for the first time ever, there are more people in working families living below the poverty line than there are in workless and retired families combined. Lowering unemployment should be a priority for any government, but it is not a fix all cure, and simply shifting children from a definition marked ‘low income workless household’ to one marked ‘low income working household’ will not relieve them from hunger.

Now, because of the way wages have fallen in real terms between 2010-2013, the Government’s absolute child poverty target would still be unattainable even if parental employment rates were to reach almost 100%. Yet the Department for Work and Pensions still seem to believe that a rise in children in working poor families is some sort of success.

While Duncan Smith and George Osborne have squabbled over how to define “poverty”, it has been at the expense of the effort to actually reduce poverty. Milburn said:

“The farce of ministers proving unable to agree on how to measure poverty after rubbishing existing measures is particularly lamentable.”

“The government’s approach falls far short of what is needed to reduce, yet alone end, child poverty in our country. Our new research shows that the gap between the objective of making child poverty history and the reality is becoming ever wider.

When it comes down to it, Milburn has been one of the best voices from Labour on social mobility in the past four years – on welfare reforms, in-work poverty, unpaid internships, higher education and child poverty, he has been taking the fight to the Tories. He has used his position as a platform to champion exactly the kind of people who Rachel Reeves has warned we are losing the support of.

He’s not only owed a few apologies, he’s owed a lot of thanks from us too.